Tuesday, March 17, 2015

Free and open to the public. Lecture hall opens at 6:30 PM, and seating is limited.

The Nasher Museum presents Odili Donald Odita, an abstract painter who uses color to mirror the complexity of the world. He explores, in his paintings, a way to address the human condition through pattern, structure and design—and also trigger memory. For the annual Rothschild Lecture he will deliver a talk, entitled “3rd Degree of Separation.” The Nasher Museum plans to commission a mural by Odita in downtown Durham, and also a large-scale wall painting at the museum, in celebration of Nasher10, the museum’s first decade.

“The colors I use are personal: They reflect the collection of visions from my travels locally and globally,” Odita says.

Odita’s work has been featured in solo exhibitions at Savannah College of Art and Design, Georgia; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; Studio Museum in Harlem; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; and Princeton University, New Jersey. In 2007, Odita’s large installation Give Me Shelter was featured prominently in the 52nd Venice Biennale.

Odita was born in 1966 in Enugu, Nigeria, and lives and works in Philadelphia. He has been the recipient of a Penny McCall Foundation Grant in 1994, a Joan Mitchell Foundation grant in 2001 and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Grant in 2007.

Thursday, March 26, 2015

Art historian and scholar Roberto Conduru will give the keynote talk, “Indices of Africa in Brazilian Art of the 1960s and 1970s,” for the Global Brazil Conference at Duke. Conduru has a cross-disciplinary approach to art history, building on visual anthropology, architecture and religion in order to examine how modernity was built in Brazil. He has published on many artists and architects, including Willys de Castro, Abraham Palatnik, Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer. His recent book of essays, Pérolas Negras – Primeiros Fios (2013), examines Afro-Brazilian artistic and cultural connections. In his talk, he will discuss how Neoconcrete Brazilian artists built on African culture to create their works. Sponsored by the Global Brazil Lab at Duke’s Franklin Humanities Institute and the Duke Brazil Initiative.